I recently purchased a large map of the World. Daddy and I were in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania a few weeks ago and there was a Lakeshore Learning store right across the street. Of course we had to go check it out and they had this large, laminated, dry-erasable wall map for $24. It wasn’t until we were home that I realized we didn’t have any wall space large enough to put it up. I ended up taping together four pieces of foam board to mount the map. This probably will work better for now anyway since it makes it portable. The kids discovered the map (and its dry-erase properties) and had a great time checking it out. Georgie played a quiz game using the compass rose asking questions such as “what direction is China from India” and “how do you get from Canada to Brazil”. I think this is going to end up being a great resource when we start our Continent studies (hopefully next week). Vicki mainly just randomly circled things and asked "what is this?"
Since we were in a Geography frame of mind, we also played a lot with the TAG US map. Georgie could be heard talking to himself “Now I know what a steamboat is!”. He also had fun hearing how many miles it was between two points and how long it would take to drive or fly between them. This will be very useful when we start studying the United States.
Right now New Jersey is enjoying (??) the snowiest January on record. We have the most snow in 116 years.
For some reason, the majority of people I talk to aren’t really enjoying it. Until this week we were having single digit temperatures with negative windchills. Not my idea of pleasant. But this Wednesday we were gifted with another foot of fresh, pristine snow along with temperatures barely below freezing. Thursday’s forecast was for sunshine and temperatures in the 40’s. I don’t think we quite achieved that but it was close enough that we ventured out into the snow.
Vicki plopped right down to make snow angels.
Georgie went for throwing snowballs at everyone.
The snow was deep and the underlying layers were very slippery. Even Zappa (yes, he’s named after Frank) preferred walking in the trails already blazed.
The snow was really hard to dig in once you got past the top layer so Vicki decided she needed to find a shovel in the sandbox. She managed to uncover one eye of our frog sandbox. There’s probably over 2 feet of snow currently covering everything with the bottom foot very compacted.
We made a couple of attempts at a snowman but whenever we would get a decent sized base, Georgie would pick it up and throw it. Finally we had a base too big for him to throw but we still didn’t get to finish our snowman.
Vicki decided it was more fun to build snow castles….
and play in the fort under our slide. She was playing a pretend game where she kept peeking out and shouting “who’s that knocking at my door?”.
They spent some time having fun on the swing.
When Vicki was swinging, Georgie kept running in front of her and dodging out of the way….
but he didn’t always make it out of the way in time.
They finished up playing a pretend game. Vicki was a baby and would cry for ice cream. Georgie would make her a vanilla “snow” cone. I made sure to steer them away from that yellow snow.
There was a large Raptor-type bird flying around for a while. It was pretty hard to get a picture of him and I couldn't find my binoculars to get a better look but he was most likely a turkey vulture, red shouldered hawk or red tailed hawk.
Considering it is still January, I’m sure we’ll have a lot more chances to enjoy the snow but I’m looking forward to the first Nature walk of the year that we can look for signs of Spring. That seems very far away at the moment.
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Adorable kids, pretty dog and beautiful snow!
ReplyDeleteThe map looks great!